The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished
glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine,
this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the
computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface.
Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in
several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was stationed in
Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back
from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when
he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as
they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And
once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so
powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling
through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia. . . . It made
him feel naked and weak and brave.
The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer,
which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep track of where
Hiro is and what direction he's looking in.
Down inside the computer are three lasers -- a red one, a green one, and a blue
one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough to
burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry your frontals,
lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors
of light can be combined, with different intensities, to produce any color that
Hiro's eye is capable of seeing.
In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the
computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of
electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and
forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as the electron
beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The
resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality.
By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be
made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it
can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a
resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive,
and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D
pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack.
So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that
his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the
lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of
time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.
glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine,
this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the
computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface.
Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in
several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was stationed in
Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back
from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when
he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as
they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And
once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so
powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling
through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia. . . . It made
him feel naked and weak and brave.
The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer,
which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep track of where
Hiro is and what direction he's looking in.
Down inside the computer are three lasers -- a red one, a green one, and a blue
one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough to
burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry your frontals,
lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors
of light can be combined, with different intensities, to produce any color that
Hiro's eye is capable of seeing.
In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the
computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of
electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and
forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as the electron
beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The
resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality.
By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be
made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it
can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a
resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive,
and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D
pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack.
So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that
his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the
lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of
time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.
( Neal Stephenson )
[ Snow Crash ]
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